Posted on 05/21/2007 4:16:57 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
It goes zero to 60 in about four seconds. Its top speed is 130 miles per hour. And it doesn't use an ounce of gasoline.
It's the Tesla Roadster, a new car that's fueled entirely by electricity and could be hitting the lot just in time. Today the Energy Department reported that the average gallon of regular gasoline is now $3.10 -- a new nominal record price for the United States.
Meet The New Electric Car! The Tesla Roadster is named after Nicola Tesla, the largely forgotten genius inventor of alternating current electricity, and it's the brainchild of Martin Eberhard, who said he designed it because he cares about the environment and because he wanted one for himself.
"It's time for us to do something about our dependence on foreign oil," Eberhard said. "It's time for us to do something about global warming. But I wasn't ready to go drive around some goofy little car. … Think of how electric cars look. All the ones you've ever thought of."
There haven't been many electric cars. Early automobiles ran on electricity, as did General Motor's ill-fated and quickly abandoned EV1, which debuted in the 1990s and died soon thereafter. Eberhard said there's "nothing beautiful" about the Prius, perhaps the best-known hybrid car. "It doesn't do anything for me," he said. "Think of it this way. A world of 100 percent hybrids is still 100 percent addicted to oil."
'The Next Great American Car Company' So Eberhard, who made his fortune with a couple of Internet companies, set out to build the car he wanted to drive, one that would change the image of the electric car forever. Eberhard said he wanted "to get people to think of electric cars as being actually hip and desirable and fun."
And that's only the beginning. Eberhard also wants to achieve something even he admits is audacious.
"Our ultimate goal is to be the next great American car company," he said, "to have a whole line of cars for every kind of driver and all of them not burning gasoline."
Eberhard teamed with another Internet millionaire, Elon Musk, the man who invented PayPal. The 35-year-old Musk is busy with another venture called Space X, which, among other projects, is contracted to design, build and operate NASA's replacement shuttle for transporting astronauts to the International Space Station. Musk said it took only five days for him to decide to invest in Tesla after meeting with Eberhard. He's put $37 million into the company so far.
"I am a big believer in Tesla, and I believe it's going to be a great success," Musk said.
Meet The New Electric Car! Behind the Wheel Instead of starting with a mass market vehicle, Tesla's doing just the opposite: starting at the high end and working its way down.
"I really believe the right entry point in the market is a sports car," Musk said. "Because there, people are willing to pay a high unit cost. So you get that into the market, and you continue to innovate and optimize and go progressively higher volume and more affordable with each successive model."
In four months they had orders for all of their "signature" cars. The first 100, with a $100,000 price tag, sold to the likes of George Clooney, the founders of Google, Arnold Schwarzenegger and William of the Black Eyed Peas.
Going forward, they plan to make 1,000 Roadsters a year, with a sticker price of $92,000. That investment gets customers a two-seater that weighs in at a relatively light 2,600 pounds and is powered by lithium ion batteries, like the ones in your computer … exactly 6,381 of them.
"They are the exact same kind of cell that would power a lap top computer or a camcorder," explained David Vespremi, Tesla Motors' director of public relations, while showing us the car. "This is very different from a combustion engine."
So different, in fact, that it isn't an engine at all -- it's a motor.
Fewer Moving Parts "The motor [is] tiny by comparison to an engine in a typical combustion car. It weighs about 77 pounds, and you could literally put it in a backpack and walk out of the room with it if you chose to," Vespremi said, while showing us the car. "What it does is, it has one moving part. It's an AC motor, so it takes current straight from the battery and turns that into … the power that moves the car down the road."
Is there anything that a standard gasoline-powered car offers that the Tesla lacks?
"Well, you have all the belts and the hoses and the gaskets and the plugs and exhaust components. None of that exists with this car. The entire drive line consists of 12 moving parts," Eberhard said, as opposed to thousands in a regular car.
But there are drawbacks: The battery pack is warrantied for 100,000 miles, but after that, replacement could be costly -- in the thousands of dollars. Tesla argues that with battery technology improving every year, each successive year's models will be better. You're not completely off the grid because it does require electricity, and you can go only 200 miles between charges.
Vespremi said the charging station can be installed by "any competent electrician," and it allows you "to get that quick charging time of 3½ hours. Most people hook it up to the drier circuit. And then you just treat it like a gas pump."
The Roadster is still in test mode -- the company hopes to start actual production this fall. The car has gone for its first round of safety tests and, according to the company, has done extremely well.
Vespremi told us that part of the reason the car is so safe is because the chassis is made of extruded bonded aluminum, "the exact same kind of chassis that would be used in something like a Formula One car or an Indy car. This is what allows those drivers to wreck at a couple hundred miles per hour and walk away," he explained.
'I Like Fast' So far, those who've put down deposits can't even test drive the Roadster; they can only be driven in it. Bob Huntley and his wife, Marilyn Miller, flew to San Carlos, Calif., from Houston to see what they're getting.
"I like fast, obviously," Huntley said, "but more important to me is the smile I will have knowing that I am not putting $50 gas in every time I want to go 200 miles. It's perfect. And I get to pass everyone while I do it."
While they work to get the Roadster street ready, the engineers at Tesla are pushing ahead on two more models. The designs are under wraps, but they envision a family-size sedan and a smaller mass-market electric car in the next two to five years. But the real money may come in selling their technology.
"We are in negotiations with some fairly big auto companies, so we hope to make a really big difference in CO2 concentration in three ways," said Musk. "One is in the cars we make ourselves, two is the licensing the electric drive trains and accelerating the technology deployment in other car companies, and three is by serving as a good example to the rest of the auto industry and hoping that they follow our lead."
Capitalism and Altruism Musk says there is an element of altruism behind the company, but that the best way to serve their goal is to make Tesla a profitable company.
"There's a lot to be said for money and glory," said Musk. "I wouldn't say that those were unimportant. There is nothing wrong with wanting to make money or have a glorious outcome. Those are good things. For me personally that's not the most important thing. But I still value those things. I'm not Mother Teresa."
Though design and testing takes place just south of San Francisco, the Tesla Roadsters will be built at the Lotus Elise plant in Hithel, England. And who gets the first car off the assembly line?
"Well, I get car No. 1," said Musk. "I guess there are some advantages to investing $37 million in a company."
Another advantage could be immortality. If Tesla works, it would be the first successful startup auto manufacturer in the United States in more than 50 years.
I would be skeptical of a claim like this. They could be ignoring distribution costs (the main cost of grid electricity) or federal and local taxes. The fact that the costs were not mentioned in this article says something.
It is amazing to me how many people think there will be some magic bullet to solve all of our energy needs and pollution issues. It's going to take a lot of different things - solar, wind and biofuels, where they're practical, won't come close to replacing fossil fuels, but they're a piece of the puzzle.
If electric and hydrogen cars make zero difference in overal pollution, they can at least move it around -- getting automotive emissions out of crowded cities where they cause smog. And as cleaner technologies become available, they only have to be rolled out to thousands of power plants instead of to millions of vehicles.
With the current state of electric car technology, they're only practical for some uses, and not cost-competitive with internal-combustion cars for most drivers. But when was the last time you saw any new technology that didn't become more efficient and less expensive as it became more widespread?
Hydrogen proponents love to point out that we can get hydrogen from water, never mind that the Laws of Thermodynamics say we won't get as much energy out of recombining it into water than we put into splitting the H2O in the first place.
Any means of fueling a car has inefficiencies. Electricity from the grid is inefficient because there aren't any zero-resistance transmission lines. One thread a month or two ago highlighted a guy in England who powers his house with a small turbine he put in a backyard stream, without significantly changing the flow of the stream. Small, decentralized solutions like that won't make the grid obsolete, but they'll reduce the demand on the grid and cut the amount of power lost to long-distance transmission.
Imagine solar cells on every rooftop in America. It's just a matter of making them cheap and durable enough to replace conventional shingles. They're not terribly efficient, but if they're inexpensive enough, it doesn't matter -- it's something for nothing.
The advantage of H2 from water is that the infrastructure is already in place to deliver electricity and water to pretty much every home and business in the country. It's not dissimilar to the reason we make ethanol from corn -- it's something we already have tons and tons of. Over the next couple of decades, I expect we'll experiment with a lot of energy alternatives, some will be practical for limited use and others not even that, before we spend billions on a new infrastructure.
Simply put, whether now for environmental reasons or later when we eventually run out of fossil fuels (however long that may take) we will need to find a replacement for the vast amount of energy that we currently get from them.
I don't think it's inevitable that we'll run out of fossil fuels in the foreseeable future, so part of any comprehensive energy strategy has to include using them more cleanly and efficiently, as well as cutting use to stretch out the supply. I'd rather not picture a future with no fossil fuel use, because I don't like cooking on an electric stove. Besides which, we're still creating fossil fuels -- there are landfills in every municipality producing methane as we speak.
Solar and wind power just aren't reliable enough to replace fossil fuels, and the mere suggestion of building a dam is almost unspeakable in 1st world Western countries today.
At least as far as I see it, the biggest problem in the US isn't the environmental objections to new hydroelectric dams, the problem is that most of the best sites for them already have a dam. There isn't really a spot to put another dam on the Colorado, and damming the Mississippi would create a serious transportation problem.
The problem with solar, wind and tidal energy is, as you rightly point out, a lack of reliability -- they're intermittent. So the challenge there is storage. That doesn't necessarily mean batteries; there are many ways to store energy. The classic, low-tech example is a water tower -- pump water up into the cistern when energy is cheap and abundant, and when energy is scarce and expensive, you can turn off (or down) the pumps and let gravity do the work.
Simply put, only nuclear power can do for us what fossil fuels do now.
More use of nuclear fission is certainly a big part, likely the biggest part, of the puzzle. But even if we bash trough a lot of the bureaucratic blockage, nuclear plants are huge and expensive, and take a long time to build. We ought to be moving on that, but it would be a mistake to jump in with both feet, building nuclear plants that will be obsolete while others of the same design are still being built.
Science and engineering are pretty well-refined in this country, but there's still a lot of trial and error, and each generation of power plants should be looked at as a test-bed for the next, with an eye to make each new plant more effective, reliable and efficient than the one that came before.
It's almost comical to watch the environmentalists fight among themselves over that point- with some having realized the necessity of developing nuclear power whilst other still go into conniptions at the mere suggestion of using more nuclear power because nuclear=evil is dogma for them.
"Environmentalists" aren't a monolithic force. I doubt that any Freepers think we should all live off the grid in a yurt, but I also suspect that few want to see a Wal-Mart built on the edge of the Grand Casanyon.
Some are, indeed, dogmatic in opposition to anything nuclear. Others have legitimate concerns about the disposal of nuclear waste, while others have overblown fears of an American Chernobyl. The debate going on among environmentalists now -- and the internal debate for many individual environmentalists -- is which is the greater threat, air pollution or spent fuel rods. In the last 10-20 years, a lot of folks have altered their thinking. Picture a graph with the nuclear waste curve flat or curving down, and the atmospheric emissions curve trending upward.
I'm not getting into the "global warming" debate, because frankly it's not all that relevant. Whether human activity is changing the atmosphere or not, reducing fossil fuel consumption is a good idea on many levels -- for starters, it reduces the reliance of our economy on crazy people in unstable parts of the world. Second, it makes our economy more self-reliant and efficient at the most fundamental level.
And finally -- this is not the pre-eminent concern, but it counts for something -- it'd just make life more pleasant. No one likes eye-burning smog during rush hour. Am I willing to tank the economy to ensure pretty skies? Of course not. But if I can spend the same, or a little bit more, to do something in a way that's more enjoyable, i often do. That's the same calculation everyone makes when ordering a meal, buying a car or choosing which hotel to stay in.
Where I part company with the Al Gore and Leo diCaprio school of environmental thought is that I don't think that wise public policy comes from an atmosphere of panic. We should be, and are, taking measured and rational steps to expand our energy base and use more alternatives. That will certainly include nuclear, but there won't be a single magic bullet.
For a precedent, I like to look back to acid rain -- haven't heard that phrase in a while, have you? It was a legitimate, measurable phenomenon, with clear and observable effects. Without shutting down the economy, we fixed it. Better scrubbing technology reduced sulphur emissions (the collapse of Rust Belt heavy manufacturing certainly contributed, too) without a mass closure of coal-burning factories and power plants.
In the case of acid rain, we saw a problem and fixed it. We oughtn't blow off environmental concerns, but we also don't need to go Chicken Little about it. We have goals that must be balanced -- jobs, a thriving economy, environmental protection. Flipping your s--t makes good theater, but bad policy. Moving forward in smart ways to balance those goals is less dramatic, but it by-God works better.
Yeah, I did too but then the hamster died.
I was wondering about the 100,000 warranty. Maybe it says 100,000 miles or 2 years whichever comes first.
But a good argument for bringing back nuclear, right? I like the approach. The earliest automobiles in the US were rich men’s toys. If it performs reasonably well, then they can keep the price up and keep getting customers. Lots of rich men in the USA.
Beautiful. Sexy as a Porshe 911.
I'll bet that's peak power capacity at maximum rated wind speed. Wind power varies as the square of the wind speed. So with normal winds, the power output would be a small fraction of that.
In many parts of the U.S., electric companies can use the most efficient generators to produce all of their power during the night.
In my part of the state of Ohio, Duke Energy began 2 years ago installing new meters, advertising to the pubic as being lighting resistent, and being a benefit to the safety to the home. Since the meters installation my monthly electric bill has more than doubled. I talked to a Duke energy employee I knew personally about the meter replacement. He laughed at me, stating that the whole "lightning thing" was a rouse to get the new meters installed at the customers expence. This is true as I was forced to pay for the new meter. The Duke enegy empoyee also stated my bill will always be higher as the new meters now finely count the individual electrons passing through the meter to be used in my home.
Alas, I don't have a ten-car garage or a ten-car budget, so I can't have one vehicle to go to the grocery store, one for scenic weekend driving, one for multi-day road trips with ten hours of daily driving, one for commuting to work, one for spinning tires in the sand on the Outer Banks, and so on. I have to compromise and pick a car that's adequate for most, if not perfect for any, purposes.
We have something like enough coal to last 600 yrs.
That's part of why, while researching alternative fuels, we should be researching better and cleaner use of traditional fuels. It is absurd to believe that we will stop burning coal in the near future.
It is also foolish to resist changes in how we use coal -- when London residents used coal for home heating, there was this nasty tendency for coal smoke to get stuck in a fog bank and kill a bunch of people.
Normally I am against projects like this
Why be against them? No taxpayer money (though possibly some tax credits) involved. I'm all for people trying new stuff. It if actually works, score!
but in this case, I am intrigued. First of all, I like the looks of the proto-type. And secondly, I believe, unlike previous tries, they are coming at it from a capitalistic viewpoint instead of mostly it’s good for the environment ploy. Building something with your eye on it being a moneymaker always makes the chances of success greater. I like their approach although I couldn’t afford their vehicle.
You pretty much nailed what I like about the Tesla roadster. Most electric cars have been boring little plastic econoboxen, less exciting, fast or safe than a Honda Civic, for twice the money.
The Tesla people took the opposite approach -- they built a car to compete with Lotus and Ferrari (at least in short distances). while they're selling they've sold one to all the Ed Begley Jrs in the world, the folks who have tons of money and want to make a statement, they can use that money to develop the technology until they build a car I can actually afford.
In that case, you should demand a refund since at 60Hz, assuming typical rates of electron flux, the power company is "selling" you the same electrons over and over again. I'd guess they're probably charging you for many orders of magnitude more electrons than you're actually getting (I'm sure you're probably getting some new electrons for your money, since some electrons are going to wander in while others are going to wander out, never to return, but mostly you're just getting the same ones over and over again).
One thing I've sometimes wondered is whether it would make any sense to coke coal and then burn it, rather than burning it in one step. I would think that that separating the coking and combustion processes would separate the CO2 from the majority of pollutants, thus making scrubbing easier; the energy used for coking should be mostly recoverable.
>“If the wondercar got 40 mpg, it would burn 5 gallons of gas to go 200 miles, at a cost of $15. 1 gallon is 35 KWH of electricity, cars are 13% efficient (on average) so the amount of electricity at the tire to do the same work is 197 KWH, which around here would cost .12 per KWH or about 23 bucks.”
Your calculator dropped a decimal point - that is 19.7 KWH and $2.30.
I wonder if it could be charged while in transit? like have a small trailer, just big enough for a portable generator like a 5kw Coleman with a small fuel tank, could it go cross country non stop?
Or would a person have to find motels with an extra drier receptacle? rooms with outside plugins for electric cars? I demand freedom to travel across the US if I wanted to and not just have this as a city commuter car. That is if it only needs 220v at over 30 amps.
Actually, you can do that in some areas. Here in Knoxville, for example, you can pay an additional fee to get “green power” exclusively from non-fossil fuel sources. Of course, living in the TVA region helps a bunch, but you have to start somewhere. :p
Why are so many conservatives hesitant to throw off the shackles of dependency, on terrorist-supporting regimes?
For that matter - if we do this right, we can rebuild an American auto industry.
Please note: Tesla motors does not have tens of billions of dollars in unfunded pension obligations to highly-paid union workers.
It’s a capitalist, conservative, American success story in the making.
We should be applauding.
Not rationalizing a few more years of indecision.
Gas cannot continue to power America. It just can’t.
Either we break the habit on our own terms, or we’re going to be really, really struggling when we have no choice anymore.
These cars are a great idea.
I’ll bet it can’t make it 50 miles at 30 below zero. Cold kills batteries. .
Electric vehicles are even older technology.
Due to regulation, disposal, and litigation. Coal is fairly close in cost to nucluer though. It’s mostly a matter of the uncertainties of cost comparisons.
Since it’s expensive, and there’s so many unknown costs in the way...many aren’t built. I still think if there’s enough federal support, nucluer could make a revival. Otherwise you’ll get the same morons that hate either power complaining about the consequence of their own choses.
I think a couple of those would look great in the yard at the Kennedy place over there in Hyanissport, don’t you?
BTW, there’s a video at the website which is absolutely awesome.
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